When Nataly Dawn began collaborating with Jack Conte as Pomplamoose, they didn't have any dreams of becoming pop stars. They planned to make videos for a few songs they'd written and put them online.

Unexpectedly, their bright, sunny vibe and quirky humor struck a chord: In 2009, they sold approximately 100,000 digital singles and logged more than 50 million views of their videos.

But the San Francisco singer-songwriter also has a solo career and began accumulating songs that didn't fit under the Pomplamoose umbrella. Melodically, they were bright and cheery, though the lyrics were dark and pensive.

"I had a rough couple of years," Dawn says. "I was thinking about the women in my life, who informed the way I think and feel. I explored ideas of religion and what it means to be a woman and how you deal with the tension between what's expected of you and what you actually want to be."

Dawn's interest in religion goes back to her youth as the daughter of missionaries who were assigned to ministries in France and Belgium. "They were loving and wonderful, but I disagreed with a lot of their ideas about women and other things," she says. "Luckily, I wasn't home-schooled and went to non-Christian schools. I lived a double life - my church existence on one side, the ideas I got from liberal French schools on the other.

"The French are atheist-friendly, and there's a real separation of church and state. I obviously lean toward the more liberal side, but you can't divorce your past, so I process it in my lyrics."

"My mother directed the choir at the church," Dawn says. "She imposed classical piano lessons on me. I had trouble focusing, because I wanted to write my own songs, much to the consternation of teachers who hoped I'd be a Julliard-level player."

When the church needed a new member for the church band, Dawn picked up guitar. In a few weeks, she was leading the band; playing guitar also made songwriting easier.

"It took a decade before I started writing songs I was OK with," she says. "In the last year of high school, I realized I was writing mostly bass lines, with a melody on top of them. My parents bought me a bass and I started doing open mikes, playing bass and singing."

Dawn met Conte at an open mike night and they started Pomplamoose with Conte producing, playing most of the instruments and directing their videos, all with a decidedly low-budget, do-it-yourself approach. When Dawn decided she was going to make a proper solo album to showcase her new songs, she launched a Kickstarter campaign to raise the money.

"I made videos to promote myself," she says. "One of them was featured in the Kickstarter newsletter, and I wound up raising $100,000 to make 'How I Knew Her.' "

"When you're writing lyrics about dark subjects, you sit in front of the blank screen and extract painful memories and ideas," she says. "By the end of the process, you've had a cathartic and sometimes uncomfortable experience. It's not what most people want to do with their days. Most people don't want to relive that stuff, but I've found some of my best material comes out of dealing with my self-inflicted pain."